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Liz Uihlein, 75, said in the message to employees: “After these long months, I thought we’d never get it. Well, Trump got it,” she said.

The Uihleins have an estimated net worth of about $4bn

Richard Uihlein is listed by the Center for Responsive Politics, the campaign watchdog group, as the fifth largest private donor to outside spending groups in the 2020 election cycle, having donated about $62m to conservative anti-tax and anti-labor groups like the Club for Growth.

A 57-year-old man with life-threatening heart disease has received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a groundbreaking procedure that offers hope to hundreds of thousands of patients with failing organs.

“This is a watershed event,” said Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of the United Network for Organ Sharing and a transplant physician. “Doors are starting to open that will lead, I believe, to major changes in how we treat organ failure.”

It creates the pulse, it creates the pressure, it is his heart,

The schools were supposed to reopen this week, and the reversal could threaten aid because international officials had made girls’ education a condition for greater assistance.

Under the Taliban’s first rule, from 1996 to 2001, the group barred women and girls from school and most employment.

The news was crushing to the over one million high school-aged girls who had been raised in an era of opportunity for women before the Taliban seized power in August last year — and who had woken up thrilled to be returning to classes on Wednesday.

The donors, for their part, are also starting to come around. “If Trump is the nominee, I think there would be a sufficient appetite to end the last eight years of the leftward direction and overregulated economy that the majority of donors will support him,” the veteran fundraiser Fred Malek told the Washington Post. Stan Hubbard, a billionaire from Minnesota, concurred, telling Politico, “I would kind of hold my nose doing it, but I would have to do it.”

For Trump to become acceptable to the party regulars, he will have to show he can act the part. “He’s got to do a number of things,” said Scott Reed, the chief political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “He’s got to build a national campaign. He’s got to unite the party. He’s got to run a convention. He’s got to go up against the Clintons.” But the first three items on that list were things he could be taught or helped with

Trump, Reed believes, will grow into the role once the nomination is in his grasp. “It’s a big responsibility, and I think he will recognize that,” he said. “He’s going to recognize that being the nominee of the Republican Party is bigger than Donald Trump. I think he’s going to mature.” He added, “That’s not based on anything factual. I just think he’ll come to that conclusion.

Charles Koch thinks Hillary Clinton might be a better president than the Republican candidates

billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, arguably two of the United States's most influential big-money donors in conservative politics, have kept quiet this presidential cycle.

They unveiled a budget of up to $900 million for the 2016 presidential election cycle at their donors' retreat in January.

With the midterms over, Mr. Christie and Mr. Bush have begun pushing top bundlers to commit to them in advance should they announce a White House bid, according to several donors, putting intense pressure on the corps of contributors who helped Mr. Romney and the Republican Party raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign. Those requests have intensified the discussion in some circles about whether to coalesce behind a candidate early or, alternatively, delay until after the early Republican debates next summer.

“When you get that call” to commit to Mr. Bush or Mr. Christie, said one prominent Republican fund-raiser, “the answer to that question is yes.”The fund-raiser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationships with all three men, added: “Anything else and you’re on the B team. You’re on the second list. People that like to do this want to be on the A team.”

fighting the kind of corruption that plagues not only New York State but the whole nation isn’t just about getting cuffs on the right guy. As with the recent conviction of the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell for receiving improper gifts and loans, a fixation on plain graft misses the more pernicious poison that has entered our system.

Corruption exists when institutions and officials charged with serving the public serve their own ends. Under current law, campaign contributions are illegal if there is an explicit quid pro quo, and legal if there isn’t. But legal campaign contributions can be as bad as bribes in creating obligations. The corruption that hides in plain sight is the real threat to our democracy.

The structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can’t even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day. When you spend a lifetime serving campaign donors, it may seem easy to serve them when they come with an outright bribe, because it doesn’t seem that different.

When it comes to the Republican Party’s basic presidential-level problem, though — the fact that many persuadable voters don’t trust a Republican president to look out for their economic interests — it should be easy to tell whether the way a candidate differentiates himself will actually make a difference. Just look at what he proposes on two issues: taxes and health care.

One reason issues like immigration and education are appealing to Republican politicians looking to change their party’s image is that policy change in these areas seems relatively cheap — more green cards here, new curricular standards there, and nothing that requires donors and interest groups to part with their favorite subsidies and tax breaks.

On taxes, the party has been enamored of reforms — some plausible, some fanciful — that would cut taxes at the top while delivering little, or even higher taxes, to most taxpayers. (It’s an odd position for a party that is officially anti-tax to take in an age of wage stagnation, but at least the donors have been happy.

Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland and lead sponsor of The Government by the People Act, described the current post-Citizens United reform strategy as “the empowerment approach” as opposed to a “rules based approach.

“The thing about money is that it always seems to find a way around the rules,” Sarbanes said. A “power-based reform” seeks to “match power with power” instead

The first is a shift away from candidate dependence on PACs and other special interest sources and an increase in the amount of money politicians raise from their own constituents.

there's only one reason New York is an essential campaign stop for candidates from all 50 states: money.

those of us who provide the money extraordinary access to our elected leaders and candidates. We can shape how candidates talk about an issue, influence what issues they might choose to highlight or ignore, and entice promises about what they will do in office.

private donors on both the left and right, advocate for policies that we perceive to be in the public interest, our perspective is dramatically unrepresentative of the American electorate. Top political donors are overwhelmingly male, white, urban, and, of course, rich.

The sustained determination on the part of the conservative movement has paid off in an unprecedented realignment of power in state governments.Seven years ago, Democrats had a commanding lead in state legislatures, controlling both legislative chambers in 27 states, nearly double the 14 controlled by Republicans. They held 4082 state senate and house seats, compared to the Republicans’ 3223.Sweeping Republican victories at the state level in 2010 and 2014 transformed the political landscape

By 2015, there were Republican majorities in 70 percent — 68 of 98 — of the nation’s partisan state houses and senates, the highest number in the party’s history. (Nebraska isn’t counted in because it has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature.) Republicans controlled the legislature and governorship in 23 states, more than triple the seven under full Democratic control.

“How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States,” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol, in the Winter edition of the journal Democracy, documents the failure of the left to keep pace with the substantial investments by the right in building local organizations.

The book’s starting premise is acknowledging the mid-2000s slowdown in labor productivity growth in the advanced industrialized economies. There are lots of debates about why there was a productivity slowdown and whether it can be reversed.

Mother Jones, connects the contributions made by wealthy donors to the GOP and their push for the 2017 tax cut

In a polarized political climate, secular stagnation will encourage America’s economic elite to tilt further rightward in the coming decade, even though the Republican Party will continue to drift in a populist direction, supporting new barriers to international trade and migration.

Buoyed by November election results, a surge in fundraising and expectations of a massive liberal wave, Democrats are preparing for an assault on one of the GOP’s most heavily fortified positions: governors mansions.

But the atmospheric conditions have changed since then. Republicans are hampered by an unpopular President Donald Trump. Suburban voters are threatening to desert the party en masse. And Democrats have seen a massive increase in their fundraising numbers after gubernatorial wins in Virginia and New Jersey in November. The GOP is forced to defend 13 states that former President Barack Obama won — from Maine to New Mexico to Wisconsin — while Democrats are protecting just one — Pennsylvania — that fell to Trump.

Their concerns are legion: With the White House dominating the news across the country on a daily basis, pollsters are seeing signs of a prospective surge in Latino voters that could swamp Republican candidates in battleground states like Florida and Colorado, put New Mexico’s governor’s race even further out of reach and making Arizona’s competitive.

Upended by the coronavirus outbreak, nonprofits are laying off workers and seeking help from stretched donors.

Nonprofits like No Limits are ubiquitous in the United States: built on a dream, dedicated to good works, thinly capitalized. Like so much in American life, they have been upended — perhaps temporarily, maybe forever.

Crucial spring fund-raisers and conferences have been canceled or moved to less lucrative online venues. Donors are stretched in many directions, preoccupied with their own problems, and much less flush than they were two months ago. Nonprofits that are paid by local governments said new rules against large gatherings were making their services impossible to deliver, placing their existence at risk.

After months of internal hand wringing, the Democratic Party’s biggest financial backers have flocked to former Vice President Joe Biden. And Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Senator running as the scourge of the elite, is trying to turn it against him.

As the Democratic presidential race shifts into a two-person contest, two campaigns with two very different funding models are now being put to the test: Biden’s bid backed by longtime Democratic donors and bundlers who have now united behind him, and the massive grassroots movement of small-dollar donations that has fueled Sanders. In a sense, the dueling models are a microcosm of the competing visions for the Democratic Party itself: whether it will continue operating under the status quo, or shift towards the grassroots-led model the progressive wing has been pushing for years. Whoever prevails will not just get the party’s nomination, but could possibly determine its future financial model.

“The folks who, for a long period of time would not give me money for the campaign because they did not think [Biden] was going to be the leading candidate turned — particularly turned when Pete [Buttigieg] and Amy [Klobuchar] came on board and since [Michael] Bloomberg dropped out,” says attorney Stephen Cozen, founder of the law firm Cozen O’Connor and a Philadelphia-based Biden donor who has been raising money since he entered the race. “I’ve had a tremendous influx of contributions to the campaign from people who have said ‘You were right all along.'”

Human rights lawyers have accused the UK and other large donors of blocking the release of a multimillion-dollar UN fund to provide relief to victims of a cholera epidemic that has killed 10,000 people in Haiti.

The outbreak, which affected hundreds of thousands of Haitians, was caused when infected UN peacekeepers from Nepal brought the disease to the country in 2010.

Ban Ki-moon said deadly outbreak that killed up thousands ‘leaves a blemish’ on United Nations’ reputation, ending six years of refusing to claim responsibility

Donald Trump's push to route his supporters' money through his own political apparatus, rather than traditional Republican campaign committees, has ignited fears among GOP donors and operatives that the former president could hamstring the party's efforts to win House and Senate majorities in next year's midterm elections.

Letters in recent days from Trump's lawyers to the Republican National Committee and the party's House and Senate campaign arms have warned against using Trump's name to raise money.

"No more money for RINOS," Trump said in a Monday evening statement. "They do nothing but hurt the Republican Party and our great voting base--they will never lead us to Greatness. Send your donation to Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com. We will bring it all back stronger than ever before!"

Right after the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, dozens of U.S. companies announced they would halt political donations to the 147 Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn Donald Trump’s presidential election loss. Two months later, there is little sign that the corporate revolt has done any real damage to Republican fundraising.

If anything, the biggest backers of Trump’s false election-fraud narrative - such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene - have been rewarded with a flood of grassroots donations, more than offsetting the loss of corporate money. And contributions from both small donors and rich individuals looking to fight the Democratic agenda have poured into the party’s fundraising apparatus.

Interviews with Republican operatives, big-money donors and fundraisers revealed little apprehension that corporate outrage over the Jan. 6 Capitol riots would damage the party’s fundraising for the 2022 congressional elections.Dan Eberhart, a major Republican fundraiser, said he had predicted for years that Trump’s support would collapse. He believed the Capitol insurrection would be the tipping point.“The data is the opposite,” Eberhart said. “You are seeing a hardening of support for Trump … I think there will be no shortage of money.”